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Can someone explain to me "the first fully virtualized operating system." ?

Thanks

I'm probably going to get this wrong, but I'll take a stab at it...
In a modern server, it's quite common to separate the web server from the database server even if they run on the same hardware.. That way if your web server gets hacked and the hacker gets root access, the hackers won't have access to your database and vice-versa even if it runs on the same hardware... The way to do it currently is to run multiple operating systems at the same time inside of their own virtual machines. Then under the host OS, you don't run any services and lock it down very tight to be sure it doesn't get compromised.. If one of the virtual machines gets compromised, as least it isolates the compromise from the rest of the server.. Also it's a lot easier to move your database server over to other hardware if you need to.. You just copy the image over to the new hardware and start it up..

The problem with doing the above is that you need to run multiple instances of the OS (host OS + OS instance for each virtualization) and it can really chew through a lot of server resources, especially in OS overhead.

A fully virtualized OS can provide complete isolations (similar to chroot) and can ensure the fair access to hardware across virtualizations so that one hacked virtualization can't establish a monopoly on all the CPU cycles, network bandwidth or disk I/O no matter how many processes it spawns... And it also does it all without providing any direct hardware access to any of the virtualizations which is important for security and fairness reasons.

So in short.. It's basically virtual machines taken to their next logical step where you can reap the benefits of less overhead and better fairness in the access to the hardware. I don't think it helps with security over traditional virtual machines, but I'm not 100% sure there.. Certainly it's a ton more secure than running your database and web server as processes under the same OS instance..

No doubt, Oracle is going to be targeting all users of VirtualBox as potential customers for their new Solaris OS as they would likely have something to gain by switching to it.

IBM Mainframes does not have Containers (Zones) as described above by Sidicas. Mainframes run a complete kernel. In Containers, only one kernel is active, and the rest of the kernels act as a thin layer. Only one kernel active. In contrast to VMware, lots of complete kernels run using lots of resources. Another thing is that everything is virtualized in Solaris, NIC, cpu, etc.

If you look at some of the world record benchmarks that Solaris has today, it uses several servers via Containers on a single server.

Actually, it is not the usual. It is something. Read here for a better explanation, if you want to know why it is interesting, and read the post after that

Wow. Solaris has Zones. It's had zones for years. And so have most of the other *nix-like OSes. Looks like maybe they've added some sales brochure bullet points. Like I say. Marketing. Means nothing. Are you saying that you are really excited about it?